A big flaw in our political process is gulf between the story a politician believes, and the story they tell to get elected. They know that the story they believe and live by is one that a majority of voters will not accept. So they tell a story they know that enough voters will accept, despite their intention to push on with their preferred story after the election.
The successful politician knows that people need a story that will seem to make sense of events, and of the decisions being made by government - they know that the story that will resonate with the electorate is the one that feels acceptable to the voters, and that objective truth does not need to be a major part of that story. Indeed, truth often runs a very distant last in the race when the other contender is a story that fits the desires, prejudices, and beliefs of the audience.
The old adage "Truth is stranger than fiction" is particularly applicable in the field of politics. Even a light skim of the daily news - local, national, and international - will provide stories that make you stop and exclaim "How could anyone be so stupid" or "Surely they didn't think we would believe that" or "I wonder who is paying who" or even just "That can't possibly be the real reason they are doing this - what is really going on?"
Every now and then a novelist hits the big time by asking the right "What if" question, and then turning the answer into the book that gets published - just before some real life incident that closely resembles the plot of the novel. How many "What Ifs" have been discarded as too unrealistic, only to find reality mirroring imagination within weeks or months of the screwed up paper hitting the side of the rubbish bin? In a flash, an idea that seemed too outlandish to publish has become a moment in the history books. How many authors have stared at the evening news and asked themselves "How could I have tossed that idea away?" or "Why did I take so long to finish that first draft?" I am one - are you?
Was there, in the torrent of political thrillers that have washed across the shelves and check-out counters of the world's book shops and libraries, one that presaged the Presidential actions that gave us Watergate? Did some Italian novelist write a story that accurately predicted the awful and undignified end to which Mussolini succumbed? Apart from a possible link to an episode of The Simpsons, has any author really predicted what is happening in the USofA at the moment?
There are times when truth and fiction are equally strange and become inextricably entangled, as evidenced by the conspiracy theories that swirl about in the aftermath of great events, growing in number and complexity, and attracting supporters the way the Canberra street lights draw in the Bogong Moths.
Did anyone in Australia (or elsewhere) predict in a novel the tumultuous days that came to a head on the steps of Parliament House in December 1975? Conspiracy theories abound regarding that event, too, and who knows, perhaps one of them is fact rather than theory?
Our need to identify patterns and order make us a sucker for a story that suggests a conspiracy - some of us more so than others. Stories that hint at secrets and conspiracies get our attention - we expect every action to be the result of an active agent, to have a reason behind it, and for it to be part of a discernable, comprehensible narrative. We want answers, and we want them in a shape, texture, and colour that we can accept and enjoy.
Recently, I read Lee Child's novel "Night School" - in it, an unexpected protagonist gets between the original villains and the hero, as they all pursue the acquisition or recovery of some missing weapons. The conspiracies are manifold, and weave about each other in ever more complex patterns - yet they never discomfit the reader's willing suspension of disbelief. As part of the plot, Child has postulated a conspiracy that sees an infiltration of German law enforcement by Neo-Nazi types, though he doesn't specifically name them as such.
Only weeks after reading the novel, and within a year of its publication, I opened the newspaper and found a story about a growing scandal in Germany - it was a serious infiltration of the country's military forces by Neo-Nazis, and the subsequent misuse and theft of weapons by those infiltrators.
Humans are basically the primates who became story tellers. We use stories to make sense of ourselves and our world. Our need for stories, and the way we use and abuse them, is like the proverbial box of matches - a match can light the fire that cooks a meal or warms a hearth, or start the bushfire that razes a million acres and a thousand homes. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album
We need stories to map our past, present, and future, and many of us will cling to our favourite ones in the face of an avalanche of facts that contradict the core "truths" of those favourites. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman
Filters are applied to weed out the inconvenient truths and bothersome data, and compatible facts and information are sought out to help build and strengthen the stories we prefer. Joel Shepherd, in his Cassandra Kresnov series, coined a wonderful term to deal with this aspect of human nature, and Andrew Pollack describes it very well in his blog here - Compulsive NarrativeSyndrome
Enjoy your storytelling - may all your stories fall on eager ears, and sail on down the winds of time to become part of the great story that humanity has been weaving for so long. Perhaps, one day, one of your "What if" stories will be venerated as prophecy - or at least they may say of it, as we said of our village newspaper, years ago - "Se non e vero, e molto ben trovato".
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